Like last time, I apologise that my post on empiricism is taking so
long to prepare. You will understand why once I finish it (if anyone is
able to finish reading it). In the meantime, another short, topical
post.

You would have probably gathered that I feel particularly strongly about
this issue.

But what disappoints me most of all is the way that the case for moral
sense just doesn't seem to be presented in the main media outlets. I
know that our children are being indoctrinated in immorality as I write.
That's not to say that there is nobody put forward to challenge the
pro-murder point of view; but that for the most part they are not able to
present the full case. So I often wonder how I would fare should the
BBC (for example) call upon me as their token social conservative.
To be fair, probably not very well (since it isn't easy to present a
case to an audience which disagree with your fundamental principles in
a two minute timeslot when you are constantly heckled and interrupted;
and I am particularly bad at oral presentations even in the best of
circumstances). But I like to imagine.

Abortion Activist:

Of course we should act to enforce the law in Northern Ireland.
This is more important than democracy or the desires of the people.
It is a matter of fundamental women's rights. Fundamental human rights.

Presenter:

Thank you. Now I have with me Dr Nigel Cundy, who is in favour of
Northern Ireland retaining its laws. So you think that this is a
matter for the devolved government, when it eventually returns, to
sort out.

Me:

No, I agree that this is a fundamental matter of morality. Which
is why not only should the law in Northern Ireland be maintained,
but the Irish law should be expanded to cover the rest of the united
kingdom.

Presenter:

That's a rather controversial position.

Me:

Why is my position controversial? I have no doubt that in the future
people will look back to the current abortion industry with the
same abhorrence that we look back on the slave trade of the
seventeenth century.

Presenter:

You are comparing those who fight for women's rights with those who
denied rights to the slaves?

Me:

The analogy is quite appropriate. Both groups proceed by saying that
a section of humanity are not really human, and therefore lacked the
usual protections. It made no difference whether they lived or died.
Both groups did or do their killing out of sight, in the dark. Both
groups profited from their trades, and were supported by
parliament and the academic elite. Both groups came up with numerous
justifications for their deeds, which seemed reasonable to their
proponents but fall apart on close examination. Of course there are
differences between the two, but the similarities are striking.
I stand by my comparison.
After all, I'm not the one advocating mass murder, so why
are my views the ones on trail?

Presenter:

I think that many will be offended when you call people
murderers just for standing up for women's rights.

Me:

Murder is defined as an intentional and wilful act to terminate
an innocent human life, except as a last resort in defence.
An abortion is an intentional and wilful act to terminate the life
of an innocent human being, and in the context we are
discussing it isn't a last resort and it isn't in defence. What
exactly is your problem?

Presenter:

Well, it is not as though the foetus is really alive. I mean that
it is just a cluster of cells at that time.

Me:

Life is usually defined in terms of the natural tendency towards cell
division, growth, absorption of nutrients, metabolism,
and preserving the integrity of the
cell. From the moment of conception, a human being has the tendency
towards cell division, growth, absorption of nutrients, metabolism,
and preserving the integrity of the cell. In what way isn't it alive?

Presenter:

Well, I meant that it is not really a human life

Me:

Then what is it? A duck billed platypus perhaps? Or a tadpole?
Or an alien from the planet Zarg maybe?

Presenter:

You're being facetious. What I mean is that it isn't fully human.
It is a foetus.

Me:

We know that people gradually change as they grow. So what remains
the same that makes the child and adult the same individual? Ultimately,
it boils down to continuity of existence and the genetic code. That
genetic code and continuity were both in place since the moment of
conception. He is the same individual as the man. If you are human now,
then you were also human when you were just a few hours or days old.
Species are ultimately determined by connected regions in the genetic
landscape. Genetically the person we are discussing is a human being;
as much as you or I are. Just a human in an early stage of development,
just as the child is a human in a slightly later stage of development.
Any line you draw in our development and say after this it is human
and before some sub human thing is going to be completely arbitrary.
The only scientifically reasonable place to start is at conception,
when the two halves of the genes are merged together to form a new
individual.

Presenter:

Except it might not be an individual, might it. It could twin.

Me:

So instead of killing one person, you are now advocating killing two.
That doesn't help your case.

Presenter:

But it is not a human person, is it? It can't think. It doesn't have
memory. It isn't rational.

Me:

The definition of a person …

Presenter:

Not again.

Me:

Yes again. Because unless we can first agree on our definitions, we
can
never make any rational enquiry. The definition of a person is an
individual element of a rational substance. Well, the rational
substance is humanity, and the child is, we have agreed, an
individual element of it.
So it is a person.

Presenter:

Well here I don't agree on the definition. What do you mean by
a rational substance?

Me:

Here we need to step back a bit, and look at things a bit more
generally. We observe that things change. People grow. I mean, you
were once a child, but now you are a man. You have changed, and yet
you are the same individual. So the definition of what you are has
to incorporate both the child and the adult, and everything in
between. The technical name for each of those steps is
potentia, but since I am a physicist rather than a philosopher,
I prefer to call them states. The form (as I define it, this is a
little non-traditional) is the set of all the stable or meta-stable
states, mapped out by possible continuous changes. The form in itself
is just an abstract construction; something is needed to make it
substantial, as it were, and that something is matter. So substance is
the union between form and matter. We can have forms of species as
well as individuals; so we have the form of humanity, which covers
every possible human being; and the substance of humanity, which is
what is shared by every existing human being. Are you with me so far?

Presenter:

No.

Me:

Excellent, so I'll continue. One of the things we can in principle
do with forms is calculate the properties of a being. This is
already done to a certain extent in physics, where we can calculate
the emission spectrum of a gaseous molecule, or the compressibility
or electrical conductivity of a solid. It is an exciting time in
physics, when now at last we have access to the fundamental
mathematical structure of form, even though most physicists don't
realise that is what they are looking at. Now, when we take humanity as
a whole, we see that one of its attributes is rationality; the tendency
towards thought, or the creation of ideas. Thus humanity is not only
a substance but a rational substance. Indeed, the traditional
definition of a human being is we are rational animals. Once we have
that framework in place, then to say a person is an individual element
of a rational substance is pretty much the only workable definition
we have. We all agree that people are individuals, and we all agree
that people are of a rational substance. So what's your problem.

Presenter:

But the foetus isn't capable of thought at the time of the abortion.

Me:

Yes, but rationality shouldn't be thought of a capability, but as
a tendency. I should explain what I mean by
tendency. A tendency is a natural predisposition towards a certain
state. We don't just remain static, in the same state, but move from
one state to another, but those movements aren't random, but
ultimately progress in a particular direction. Ultimately, for
physical beings, that
direction arises from the second law of thermodynamics, but we
don't need to know the physics to understand the principle.
We have to express these defining attributes in terms of
tendencies inherent in the form rather than capabilities, because
tendencies are always explicitly present in the form, while
capabilities might be absent. For example, one of the defining
tendencies of an animal substance is the tendency towards
self-locomotion. Now a disabled person is not capable of unaided
self-locomotion. Does that mean that they are not an animal, and thus
not human? No, of course not. Because the tendency towards
self-locomotion can still be deduced from the form, the genetic code
of humanity as it were, even if it is
in practice blocked by whatever injury or disease led to the
disability. But if we defined beings in terms of their capabilities,
you would have to say that the disabled person was not fully human.
Do you really want to say that?

Presenter:

No, of course not.

Me:

Similarly with rationality. People in a coma or unconscious don't
at that moment have the capacity for rational thought. Does that
mean that at that moment they aren't a person, so we are permitted to
kill them? We are free to kill people, but only if we beat or drug them
unconscious first?

Presenter:

People will wake up from a coma.

Me:

And the foetus will develop into an adult. No, we can't define
rationality in terms of present capability, but we need something else.
If we can't use capability, that just leaves the natural tendencies.
So the foetus remains rational because it has the tendency towards
rational thought, even though the capability isn't yet realised
because of its immaturity. Thus it is and remains a person. So even if
you dispute my definition of murder, and say that murder is the
termination of a human person rather than a human life, it doesn't
help you. So somebody advocating for abortion has to argue that
that in certain circumstances murder is acceptable. They have to do
the hard work of asking themselves why murder is morally unacceptable,
and show that this case is an exception to the rule. Let's not
pretend otherwise, or try to hide the language behind euphemisms.
You support the legal enabling of mass murder in certain circumstances.
I oppose it. So what evidence do you have to back up your
extraordinary claim?

Presenter:

I don't support mass murder. It is not really a human life. It is
a sub human. A potential human. It's part of the mother.

Me:

At that stage of its development it is in a symbiotic relationship
with the mother. But symbionts aren't parts. We are distinguished in
part as individuals by our genetics. And the child is genetically
different from the mother. What it seems to me that you
are doing is arbitrarily declaring a portion of humanity as sub-human,
and fishing around for any excuse to allow you to do so. You are not
proceeding from the science to a conclusion; you are trying to
justify a conclusion, and to hell with the science if it gets in your
way.
We have seen people doing the same thing throughout history. So why
should I be any less disgusted with you than I am with those who said
that
certain races or religions were inferior humans and thus not worthy
of full protection, just because you draw the line on the basis of age
rather than race, religion or sex?

Presenter:

Being a person implies a certain degree of independence.
The foetus is not independent. Therefore it is not a person.

Me:

You are making a logical fallacy there, confusing two different
senses of the word independence. I agree that the foetus is
dependent on the mother, in the sense that he or she needs the mother
for its nutrition and protection. In that sense it is not independent.
However, when you bring up the issue of personality, the word
independent means that they are different individuals.
That's true for the foetus. So in the sense
that is relevant for the rest of your argument, the foetus is
an independent life. And thus your objection fails.

Presenter:

Regardless of your language games, you still haven't addressed the main
point. A woman still has the right to do what she wants with her own
body. You can't deny that.

Me:

Let's leave aside the fact that even if true it doesn't justify
murder, since it's not, or not only, the woman's body.
If that right really exists, then it stops where her body ends and
her child's begins.
But you have just made an extraordinarily bold claim. Do you have any
evidence for it? Can you argue for it objectively from first
principles? Why should I accept that a woman has the right to do
what she will with her body when it is evident to me that there is
no such right.

Presenter:

Are you saying that you have the right to control her?

Me:

No. I am saying that nobody has that right. I don't have the moral
right to do what I will with my body. In fact, I have never understood
what the rational basis is for saying that we have any human rights,
at least as the term is used since the enlightenment. It is not
obvious to me that we have human rights. In fact, it is obvious to
me that we don't. None of us. Not me, not you, not the lawyers at
the European court who have made a living from perpetuating the myth;
not the woman at the abortion clinic. It is just
a fiction, and not a very convincing one at that.

Presenter:

It is fundamental to modern society and international law.
Let's just stick with the right in question.
Her right to do what she will with her body comes from her
self-ownership of her body.

Me:

Well, now you have replaced one extraordinary claim with two.
Firstly, she doesn't self-own her body. She is her body.
Self-ownership would imply some Cartesian dualistic total separation
between mind and body, so her mind and body were two different
things entirely, and that is so fraught with problems, both scientific
and philosophical, that I don't think that anyone accepts it any more.
Mind and body are united together, as one substance. You can't
separate them and say one part owns the other. Neither can you say
that you own yourself, since owning and being owned are necessarily
two different things. So she doesn't own the body. She is the body.
Secondly, ownership doesn't grant you the moral liberty to use the
owned object as you will. The reason we have property is so that we
can use it according to its function, to help us to achieve some end.
Good use of something respects its function. To use something
in such a way that hinders its proper use towards that ends, or
which mocks those ends, is an evil. Some uses of an object are good,
and others evil. For example, I can use a kitchen knife either to
chop up vegetables or to chop up my cat (if I owned a cat, which I
don't). Just because I
can do something with it doesn't mean that I ought to do that. It is
the same with our bodies. Not everything we do to our bodies is good;
some things are damaging to our health. We discourage smoking, and
eating unhealthily, because they are damaging to our bodies. We
don't have the moral right to mistreat ourselves; we have the moral
responsibility to do what is good for our bodies, and others. And
you have yet to convince me that murdering a foetus is good for it.
Or good for the mother, for that matter.

Presenter:

We have the right to choose. It is her life; she will be the one
who has to take on the burden of raising the child. She should have
say on whether or not to do it.

Me:

Raising a child is just a burden? Yes, it is difficult, but it is
also a great joy, and one of our primary natural tendencies as living
organisms ourselves is to bear and raise children. Do we have the
right to choose?
The moral question is which choices are good and which choices are
evil. You cannot say that we have a right to choose, as though the
act of choosing itself makes the decision good. We both know that
people often decide to do evil things. The question is not what the
choices are, but if one particular choice is good. And if not,
whether that action is sufficiently evil that it should not only
be declared immoral but also made illegal. And you haven't yet made
the case that this exemption should be made to the law against murder.

Presenter:

Well, you haven't yet made the case that the exemption shouldn't
be made.

Me:

We'll come to that. I am confident that I can make such a case
based on objective moral values. But first let's finish hearing your
side. So far, you have just raised an argument from human rights,
and I have questioned that an argument from human rights just
reduces to an argument from human authority; whichever authority
drew up the convention you are referring to. Arguments from any
authority except God are well known to be invalid. Did they come to
the decision from a prior standard? In that case it is no
longer an argument from authority, unless you want an infinite
regress of authorities. Or did they decide on it arbitrarily? In which
case the ruling is of no value whatsoever. They could just as easily
have said the opposite. And the only reason God is exempt from this
argument is because God built the moral standard alongside His
creation of us; the objective standard is based on premises
established by God as He laid down the principles of rational animals
such as ourselves. It is built into human nature, and human nature
is designed by God. So God designed the objective standard while
designing us; so appealing to that standard doesn't bypass God.
But obviously that exception doesn't apply to anyone else.
And what other basis can we have from saying that
we have human rights? Your argument from self-ownership was first
(to my knowledge) raised by Locke, and we have already seen that that
is flawed. The other intellectual basis in the Western modern
philosophical
tradition comes from Hobbes' idea of a social contact, and again
that also fairly trivially fails. I've never signed onto a social
contract outlining my rights and duties, and I don't think you have
either. Of course, there were also
antecedents in classical philosophy. But most people today
reject that philosophy anyway, and that conception of it leads in
a different direction to what is accepted in modern society. It
would not, as a very pertinent example, grant a woman the right to
choose to do what she will with her own body. So the modern obsession
with human rights has never seemed to me to have any sound
intellectual basis. People ran with an idea from the likes of
Hobbes or Locke, or the continental philosophers, and just kept the
idea of human rights even as they rightly rejected the foundation the
idea was built on. Today, the notion
just seems to be something that people pick
up from the culture and accept uncritically, without ever stopping to
think about it. I have thought about it, and I have come to reject it,
and I think that you should too. So you can't just assert that a
woman has the right to choose. You have to prove it, from objective
principles which we can all agree on. And I don't think that you can.

Presenter:

If you don't have human rights, then you don't have the right to
free speech. So you can only argue against human rights by making
use of your human rights.

Me:

I accept that I have freedom of speech, just not the right to free
speech.

Presenter:

Does that even make sense?

Me:

I can speak freely because nobody has the right to stop me, unless
I sign away that right in a mutually agreed contract. As I said,
I don't believe in human rights. In fact, I believe in a complete lack
of human rights. Neither you, nor the prime minister, nor any
government or judge has any right or authority to compel me to
silence or too speech. Their only authority arises from their
natural purpose of ensuring that private contracts are maintained and
fairly drawn up, private property is respected, moral living
encouraged and the family protected, that we don't go beyond our lack
of rights over others, to ensure that the essential economic,
educational and health
infrastructure is provided, to protect the citizens from external
and internal armies, and ensure that justice is done to criminals.
There are a
few more purposes for which government is established in society, and
I probably
forgot some, but they are the most important ones. The people that
make up the government have the responsibility to fulfil those
purposes as well as they can; just as a teacher has the responsibility
to teach as well as she can according to the natural purposes of
teaching; or a software developer to program as
well as he can according to the natural purposes of that job.
Being in government is just one of many roles
necessary for the smooth running of society. Like all jobs, it is
defined by its natural purposes, and to be done well needs to respect
those purposes.
But the rights of the government are no bigger than
the rights of the people who make up that government, and they can't
invent rights for themselves, such as the right to prevent my speech,
out of thin air. Or the right to draw up and confer a list of human
rights out of thin air. That's just an abuse of their position.

Presenter:

Ok, we will put that aside for now. You are changing the subject.

Me:

I do that. Everything is interlinked. It is easy to run off into
digressions.

Presenter:

So you still haven't really answered the case that you are denying
women their right to choose.

Me:

What I have suggested is that there are two competing moral visions.
In one, women -- not just women but men as well -- have the right
to choose what to do with their bodies. In the other, we have the
moral responsibility to do what is good for our bodies. Both of these
are set up as general principles. Yet they contradict each other in
certain circumstances. So they can't both be valid. We have to select
one or the other, or neither of them. The moral responsibility is
grounded directly in the basic principles of ethics. The right is just
plucked out of thin air. So we have to go with the responsibility.
Nobody has the right to choose. We have the responsibility to do good,
both for ourselves and others, including our not yet born children.

Presenter:

Could it not be a moral responsibility but a legal right? In that
case there need not be a contradiction.

Me:

That's a good question, but I haven't yet covered the background I
need to answer it. I'll come back to it later.

Presenter:

What about women who are pregnant through incest, or rape? What
about children who have severe disabilities? Isn't it an unfair
burden on them to allow the pregnancy to come to term?

Me:

Well, firstly, that's a red herring. There is already an exemption
to the law against abortion for when the life of the mother, or
a twin, is endangered by the pregnancy. And that's OK; its not
murder, since it falls within the exception concerning defence.
If you were arguing that we should add additional exemptions to the
abortion law in the case of rape, for example, then I could see the
point of your question. But you are not. You are saying that some
women forced to bring children from rape to term are discomforted
by the constant reminder of their ordeal, therefore all women should
be allowed to murder their offspring below a certain age on the
flimsiest excuse. That "therefore" just doesn't follow.

Presenter:

I think discomforted is a rather weak word to use.

Me:

Fine, I accept that. It is horrific what rape victims have to go
through. You don't have to argue with me about that; I am just as
horrified by it as you are. The difference between us is not that
I don't appreciate the suffering of the rape victims, but that you
don't appreciate
the full horror of murder. You can outline in however much detail
you like about the suffering of the rape victims, and I would agree
with you, because I already know it. That makes it difficult.
But I know something which you don't appreciate, which is the even
greater horror of killing the child.
In this case, we have to choose between
two evils. That's never easy, but sometimes we have to do it.
To you, it is a silent crime because you don't see the
pain. But I do. Don't forget that evil is not a thing in itself,
but the absence, or privation to use the technical term, of some
good. That good could be related to our health; maybe some part of
our body isn't working as it should. Or it could refer to the lack
of one of our intellectual goods. Or any of our other goods.
Anyway, to murder someone is the worst evil that you can do.
Every evil deprives somebody of some good; and the damage done to
a woman through rape more than most. But to murder
someone is to deprive them of every possible good; not only every
good which the person does have, but every good they could have.
It is the worst possible act of evil. There is nothing
which can stack up against that. You can't murder an innocent
third party just to cover over the crimes of someone else, and that is
what you are proposing. There is
no justice in that. I hate having to say this, but the woman's
suffering is less of an evil than the abortion would be, so that is
the path we have to take.

Presenter:

Would you care to explain that to the woman in question?

Me:

That would be emotionally difficult. But ethics is ultimately a
matter of logic, balancing one evil against another, and we shouldn't
let emotions stop us from doing what is right.

Presenter:

Well, what about if the child is severely disabled?

Me:

Again, I understand the issue. Raising any child is difficult,
but a child with severe disabilities much harder. To watch your
child growing up with all that suffering, knowing that there is
nothing you can do about it, it must hurt you a lot, as well as the
child. It's not what the couple signed up for when they had
intercourse. But again, we have to ask what is the worst evil.
Nothing stacks up against murder. To abort a disabled child because they
are disabled is to announce to the world that people with that
disability are not worthy of life. That their life doesn't mean
anything. That it wasn't worth having. Now go to someone with
Down's syndrome, or autism, or whatever ailment you are thinking of,
and say that. Or go to their families. You can't, not if you have
any scrap of decency in you. So yes, when there is a child disabled
from birth, from before birth,
we should help the parents, since they didn't sign up for that. We
should give them whatever financial or practical help they need.
But we can't just callously murder the child; that does no-one any
good.

Presenter:

But what if the family can't afford to raise the child? Won't
they just be condemning it to a life of poverty and misery?

Me:

Well, certainly poverty isn't a good thing. And society has the
responsibility to help alleviate child poverty, and that's something
we haven't been very good at. As far as I can see, most of the
government attempts to alleviate the issue have made the matter
worse. Neither party understands the issue; they just put in measures
because they think they must do something, without checking whether
that something is actually going to be effective. We should encourage
marriage. Train people so they can stay
together and support each other. Ensure that everyone earns enough to
raise a family, perhaps
through increasing child support or by allowing stay at home parents
to share their full personal allowance with their spouses. And we
should reduce the unnecessary financial burdens which aren't someone
else's wage, such as reducing rents and house prices to make living
in places like London affordable. It won't be easy, though. The poor
will always be with us, unfortunately. But that's not relevant to the
question in hand. You can't justify one moral evil by saying that it
might avoid some problem in the future, especially when you still have
time to overcome that problem by other means. Consequentialist ethics is a
fast track to nowhere, and has been soundly disproved. For example,
modern physics is indeterminate. The same cause can have different
effects. This means that we can have two identical people in an
identical situation and who make identical choices, and the
consequences of those actions could be different. If you judge
the ethical value of an action by its consequences, you would
arbitrarily have to pick one of those people as good and the other
as evil. The example I usually use is an extension of the
Schroedinger's cat thought experiment. You have a diseased cat, and
a box with two vials, one containing a cure and the other a toxin.
Each vial is opened by a radioactive trigger, and the first atom to
decay opens the vial and forces the other one shut. You put the cat
in the box. If the cure was triggered first, then the act was good.
If the toxin was triggered first, then it was evil. But you can have
different people put the cat in the box, and get different results.
So if the ethical worth of the act is judged by the consequences, then
some people will be arbitrarily picked out as good and others as evil.
That's surely unjust. So one of the premises must be wrong, and the
only one which can be wrong is that the goodness of an action is
judged by the consequences of that action. You
can't justify a present evil by appealing to a possible future good.
You do good now, and good then.
You need to judge each act on its own merits, and do your best to
alleviate anything that ensues as well as you can when the time
comes.

Presenter:

But if you outlaw abortion, people will still get abortions, just
through unsafe back alley clinics.

Me:

That's like saying if you outlaw rape, then people will still commit
rape, just do it without using condoms. You wouldn't accept that
argument, so why should I accept yours? You can't avoid passing a
law because you are afraid that people will break it. All you can do
is ensure that the laws you pass are morally sound, and to
educate people to follow them.

Presenter:

You said earlier that you don't believe in human rights. So what
right do you have to impose your morality on everyone else?

Me:

I object to the way that you phrase that question. There is no
such thing as my morality. There is just moral behaviour,
objective and universal. Your question is just like asking what right
have I to impose the law of gravity on everyone else, just because I
happen to like it. The question is nonsensical.

Presenter:

But aren't you just committing the naturalistic fallacy here?
We know that morality isn't objective. We each find our own way
as best we can.

Me:

What do you mean by the naturalistic fallacy?

Presenter:

It's the idea that you can't objectively define moral goodness. You
can only think of it subjectively.

Me:

The term naturalistic fallacy was coined by the philosopher
G.E. Moore, in an influential paper from the early twentieth century.
I forget which year it was published, but I can look it up if you
want it.

Presenter:

That's not necessary.

Me:

Anyway, his argument in brief was that moral philosophers before him
were defining goodness in two different ways, and confusing the two
senses. For example, for applied ethics, we should define goodness as
that
which we ought to aim to be. That's the definition that is needed
as the basis of
any practical applications. But it's not much use to us if we want to
know what goodness is, in terms of something we can point to. So
people
were also equating goodness with other things, such as happiness, or
pleasure, or the avoidance of pain and so on. What Moore claimed was
that his predecessors as ethical philosophers jumped from
one definition to the other without any logical reason to do so.
He also claimed it was not possible to have some practical definition
of goodness which we could point to and which we could confirm as
being what we ought to aim at being. There would always be that jump
in the definitions. That jump is obviously a logical fallacy, and
Moore called it the naturalistic fallacy.

Presenter:

That's what I said, isn't it. So it pretty much proves that you
are trying to impose your ethics on women.

Me:

No less than those women are trying to impose their ethics on their
not-yet-born children.
What is interesting is how Moore went about trying to prove his claim.
He basically went over every philosophical ethical model that he
could think of, and showed that it committed the naturalistic fallacy.
So he didn't offer a general proof that it is not possible
to have an objective ethical theory. Much of his paper was in fact pretty
good. To my mind, he destroyed pretty much every post-enlightenment
ethical work before his time, except possibly that of Kant, and of
course Nietzsche's
anti-ethics. And Kant fails for other reasons. Moral relativism,
which grew up in response to Moore's ideas, is
also a dead end, and self-contradictory. The claim that there are no
objective moral rules but only subjective ones is treated as an
objective moral principle. It would both say that my belief in
objective moral rules is both true for me and false in general.
But if it is true for me then it must by nature be true in general.
It can't be both true and false. Thus moral relativism is a
nonsense. And we don't live by those principles anyway. Moral
relativists are usually the first to impose their beliefs on
others who they accuse of offending them. But, getting back
to the topic, Moore neglected the
most influential moral philosopher in the Western tradition. Among
the classical philosophers, he discussed Plato's metaphysics, but
neglected Aristotle's.

Presenter:

But Aristotle's philosophy and moral theory has been largely
debunked, hasn't it?

Me:

I wouldn't say so. It has been largely misunderstood. The accounts of
it I have read in the general philosophical texts, except those
written by the contemporary Aristotleans, have largely missed the main
point. Moore probably thought that he addressed Aristotle when he
discussed happiness. But happiness is a poor translation of
what Aristotle meant, and the modern word rather misleading. But
let's try a different approach. Do you think that Moore made a good
argument? Yes or no.

Presenter:

That's for the philosophers to judge, not me.

Me:

Yes or no.

Presenter:

Well, since I brought the subject up, yes.

Me:

So what do you mean by a good argument? You must have defined
the term if you think Moore's thesis is good; yet if Moore's thesis is
good you can't define it in a way that is useful. But if Moore's
argument isn't good,
then why should we pay any attention to it? So ultimately, the
naturalistic fallacy argument is self-contradictory. There must be
an exception.

Presenter:

The argument is good for me.

Me:

It is claimed to be a general principle. So it is either good for
everyone or good for no-one. Which puts us back where we started.

Presenter:

But isn't there a difference between moral goodness and the sense
used in saying that an an argument is good.

Me:

Well let's consider what we mean when we describe something as
good. We mean that it is fit for purpose. So, for example, the
purpose of most academic papers is to present some previously unknown
truth and persuade people of its truth. That's ultimately what science
or philosophy are about. So a good paper is one that succeeds in both
those goals. Or we can think about a good teacher, or a good
sportsman, or a good radio presenter, or a good apple. In each case,
we use the word good to mean fit for purpose.

Presenter:

But that doesn't apply to moral goodness, does it?

Me:

The next thing we need to ask is whether this definition fits in with
the sense of a goodness as what something ought to be. The point is in
each case, the object is defined by the purpose. So I'm saying that
a good teacher is one that teaches. If you desire a teacher to not be
good, then you desire for them to teach badly, or not at all. In other
words, you desire for the teacher to not be a teacher. That's almost
a contradiction; the only reason it's not a contradiction is that the
teacher is only a teacher accidentally rather than essentially. They
could be a software developer, or an astronaut. But, if we set aside
that quibble -- say that there is some purpose or something which
plays the same role that is essential to humanity -- we find that it
is irrational to do anything except
to desire for goodness as I have defined it. So this sense of goodness
escapes Moore's naturalistic fallacy.

Presenter:

But a teacher could not be a teacher. It's not a contradiction,
so you haven't yet shown anything.

Me:

Now recall what I said earlier about living beings being defined by
certain tendencies; animal beings being defined in terms of other
tendencies; rational beings by further tendencies. Not capabilities,
but tendencies. Now these tendencies also define something similar
to purposes; I call them natural purposes, but there isn't really
a word in modern English that describes the concept. We automatically
associate a purpose with an intellectual purpose, and what I'm
thinking of is something different; something inherent in the
definition of the being. Now to seek to block one of those tendencies
is to implicitly desire that the being lacks it. You want, at that
moment, the being to be something that
lacks the natural tendency. But the tendency defines what something is.
In other words, you desire that it is what it
isn't. A contradiction and wholly irrational. Thus we ought to desire
that things develop into a potentia or state where they
these natural tendencies flower into natural capabilities.
And thus we have a definition of goodness
which we can both point to and use. Obviously, people develop this
further into lists of virtues and vices. It can be proved from this
beginning that charity, hope, faith,
humility, justice, prudence, temperance,
fortitude and so on are virtues, and that pride,
anger, lust, envy, sloth, greed,
gluttony and so on are vices. Any good man has those virtues as
part of their character. Any evil man will exhibit some of
the vices. This work was done by the medieval philosophers.
But that goes beyond what I need in this discussion.

Presenter:

So are you coming to a point?

Me:

Two points, in fact. Lets start with the act of murder. By killing
someone, you are frustrating every single one of their natural
purposes. There is no good left at all; it is the most evil thing you
can do. There is a hierarchy between vegetable life, to animal life,
to rational animals. To kill a carrot plant to prevent a rabbit from
starving is OK. To kill an animal for no purpose at all, or for an
necessary end such as to take their fur for us to wear when we don't
need it, is not. But we are at the top of the chain, because killing
us not only frustrates the vegetative and animal ends, but also the
intellectual ends. This is the fundamental argument as to why
murder is immoral. This is the intellectual basis of that fact we
all accept, and Moore and Hume showed that it is
pretty much the only possible basis it could have,
since it is the only known way to evade their argumentation
(if you exclude divine commands).
But this argument makes no mention of age.
So it doesn't matter whether the person you kill
is a forty year old man, or was conceived an hour ago. In fact, in
many ways killing the youngest of us is worse, because they still have
all their possibilities ahead of them. Both the forty year old and
the zygote
possess the natural ends of humanity. You are still frustrating those
ends. So what you are doing in taking a life, any life,
is an act of the greatest evil.

Presenter:

I am not sure that I agree with your claims there, but I think I see
where you are coming from.

Me:

Then there is the case of the mother. Among our natural ends is the
tendency towards reproduction. This is one of the defining tendencies
of any living being, so it obviously includes ourselves. Because we
are rational animals, the parents are not only responsible for the
physical emergence of the child, but also its intellectual
development. The child is conceived, it's healthy, it is there in
the womb. That's not only good for the child, it is a good for the
mother, because it helps her achieve her natural ends. And the father
as well. And then the abortion clinic comes along, and cuts it off.
It's not only a crime against the child, but against the mother as
well. It's ironic. We anti-abortion people are derided as being
anti-women, but in reality we are the ones who care for her good, and
the abortionists who perpetuate an evil against her. We are only
anti-women if you accept the presumptions of the abortion advocates.
But we don't accept those presumptions, and I have been trying to argue
that nobody should. The anti-abortion activists outside the clinics are
there to express their love for the women. If they didn't love, they
wouldn't care and they wouldn't be there. They are the pro-women people,
and those in the clinics tempting the women into evil, and their
supporters in the parliaments and media and in those marches on the
streets are, whatever they may think of themselves, the ones who
truly hate women and femininity. Of course, the
crime against the child is greater still, but even so. And as I said,
this ethical theory is built on objective principles. You might not
accept it, and that's partly because I can't present it fully in a
short discussion like this, and I'm not the best qualified person to
do so in any case, but if so, that's not a problem with the theory,
it is a problem with you. To deny it is as irrational as denying the
law of gravity. To legislate against it is a mark of moral insanity.

Presenter:

But doesn't the woman have the right to decide for herself what is
good for her? Shouldn't we let her make that decision?

Me:

In some things, yes. But not everything. People make mistakes. Not
everyone is an expert on moral philosophy. And we also have
weaknesses; even when we know what we ought to do, we often find
ourselves doing the opposite. In this case, the point is that it's not
just about the woman. Yes, it is good for the woman to bear the child,
but maybe she mistakenly thinks otherwise. But we don't give people
the right to decide to harm others. In this case, abortion is about
harming the child. It is not a decision for her to make, because it
is not just about her. We have the obligation to help the weak, and
do all we can to prevent her from killing it. We all accept that after
the child is born. Why is it so difficult to accept that the same
principle applies before birth?

Presenter:

But what about the other goods of a woman? If she has the baby,
she might need to give up on her career or social life. Yet both of
those are other goods. Either way, there is going to be an evil,
so why shouldn't the abortion be the lesser evil? Especially if she
can have another child to make up for it later.

Me:

While a career is good, and a social life good, they are only
secondary goods. They are accidental ends, not essential ends.
So, for example, if a nurse needs to give up on her nursing to be
a mother, then she is giving up on one good to take on another. But
being a mother is more important than being a nurse (even though
nursing is one of the most important jobs in society), because
the purposes that define nursing are ones we create, while the
purposes that define motherhood are built into what it means to be a
woman. It is the greatest and most important job that anyone can do.
Why should we encourage people to turn it down for lesser things?

Presenter:

But all this just addresses the moral issue about whether abortions
are good. What about the legal issue? That's what matters most.
Should we use the law to force your view to deny other people who
might not accept your opinion their choice?

Me:

As I said, everything is judged against its purpose. I listed some
purposes of the government above. Among them, the government is
obliged to prevent people from denying others of their goods by
force. To assert rights over others which they don't have, as it were.
It is there to protect the weak in society. And who are the weakest
and most in need of protection than the not-yet-born people? So one
would expect that the government should legislate to protect them.

Now, not everything that is immoral should be illegal. But the law
ought to reflect ethical reality. It should not compel people to
do things that are immoral, nor prevent people from pursuing their
and other people's goods. For example, if you do something immoral
against yourself; damaging your own property for example, then
that shouldn't be illegal. The government exists to regulate affairs
between people, but for the most part not one's own private doings.
Equally, there are some things, such as lying, that everyone does,
so if we made that illegal then everyone would be arrested. But it
is generally agreed that the most serious moral offences should also
be made illegal. And if any moral offence should be illegal, then it
should be the worst of them, which is murder. So the government
should pass laws against mothers murdering their children. And it
doesn't matter whether those children are outside the womb or within
it.

And this is why there shouldn't be a legal right to do what you will
with your body, or a legal right to choose. In either case, you
will be passing legislation that, in some circumstances,
contradicts ethical mandates. Encourages people into gross
immorality. Prevents people from fulfilling their moral obligations.
Every law restricts choice. The law against rape restricts people
from choosing to commit rape. The law against arson restricts
people from choosing to burn down buildings. You can't protest
against a law because it denies choice. That's what all laws do,
even the ones you agree with. The question is which choices are
good, and which choices are sufficiently evil that they should not
only be crimes against moral sense but crimes against the law. And
I am of no doubt that abortion, except in the most extreme
circumstances, belongs in the second category. Therefore abortion is
not only a moral crime, it also ought to be a legal crime. And that
is why we should not only support the Northern Irish in their stand,
but roll back the abominable laws which were passed some fifty years
ago to the shame of the rest of the United Kingdom.

Well, anyway, as I said that's all not going to happen. I won't be given the
opportunity to say all that I want to say; not in a two minute interview,
anyway. But it is what I would like to say.
At least even if I can't say it, at least I can get it off my chest and
relieve some of my burden by writing it.

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